By Andrea Pilloni
In December 2018 a funeral for 62 AIBOs, robotic dogs made by Sony, was held at Kofukuji Temple in Isumi City, Chiba Prefecture, east of Tokyo. It is not the first time the 450-year-old temple offers such a service and with time it seems the request for it is growing. Thanks to a strong media coverage that reached overseas, this phenomenon has sparked curiosity and debate among Buddhist communities, robotic enthusiasts and scholars. I think that such events, despite their small scale, perfectly fit in contemporary anthropological debates about agency, technology, non-human beings and I argue they may even lead us to challenge our own assumptions about how humans generate processes of social engagement with non-humans or artificial entities.
Living and dying as a robot
The funerary rite for AIBOs, conducted by the Buddhist priest Bungen Oi, does not appear to be very different from the ones usually performed for humans. The priest recites and chants sutras surrounded by incense smoke, addressing the dead robots frontally, and praying for their soul. Many owners attach to the body of their robot dogs coloured letters in which they write prayers, biographical details and goodbye messages. Together with traditional Buddhist decorations such as flowers and fruits, the altars are adorned with pliers, wire clippers, and circuit testers. In some occasions the sutras are recited by AIBOS specifically programmed to do so. After the ceremony, components of the bodies of the ‘deceased’ AIBOs will be recycled to repair other robots (Maiko 2019).
The funerals started in 2015 thanks to the effort of Nobuyuki Norimatsu, a Sony ex-engineer and founder of A.FUN, a company specialised in repairing electronic devices. After Sony shut down their repairing service in 2014,
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